The amount of static and dynamic information available today on the Internet is staggering, and continues to grow exponentially. Users searching for information, news, or products and services are quickly overwhelmed by the volume of information, much of it useless and uninformative. A variety of techniques have been developed to organize, filter, and search for information of interest to a particular user. Broadly, these methods can be divided into information filtering techniques and collaborative filtering techniques.
Information filtering techniques focus on the analysis of item content and the development of a personal user interest profile. In the simplest case, a user is characterized by a set of documents, actions regarding previous documents, and user-defined parameters, and new documents are characterized and compared with the user profile. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,933,827, issued to Cole et al., discloses a system for identifying new web pages of interest to a user. The user is characterized simply by a set of categories, and new documents are categorized and compared with the user's profile. U.S. Pat. No. 5,999,975, issued to Kittaka et al., describes an online information providing scheme that characterizes users and documents by a set of attributes, which are compared and updated based on user selection of particular documents. U.S. Pat. No. 6,006,218, issued to Breese et al., discloses a method for retrieving information based on a user's knowledge, in which the probability that a user already knows of a document is calculated based on user-selected parameters or popularity of the document. U.S. Pat. No. 5,754,939, issued to Herz et al., discloses a method for identifying objects of interest to a user based on stored user profiles and target object profiles. Other techniques rate documents using the TFIDF (term frequency, inverse document frequency) measure. The user is represented as a vector of the most informative words in a set of user-associated documents. New documents are parsed to obtain a list of the most informative words, and this list is compared to the user's vector to determine the user's interest in the new document.
Existing information filtering techniques suffer from a number of drawbacks. Information retrieval is typically a two step process, collection followed by filtering; information filtering techniques personalize only the second part of the process. They assume that each user has a personal filter, and that every network document is presented to this filter. This assumption is simply impractical given the current size and growth of the Internet; the number of web documents is expected to reach several billion in the next few years. Furthermore, the dynamic nature of the documents, e.g., news sites that are continually updated, makes collection of documents to be filtered later a challenging task for any system. User representations are also relatively limited, for example, including only a list of informative words or products or user-chosen parameters, and use only a single mode of interaction to make decisions about different types of documents and interaction modes. In addition, information filtering techniques typically allow for extremely primitive updating of a user profile, if any at all, based on user feedback to recommended documents. As a user's interests change rapidly, most systems are incapable of providing sufficient personalization of a user's experience.
Collaborative filtering methods, in contrast, build databases of user opinions of available items, and then predict a user opinion based on the judgments of similar users. Predictions typically require offline data mining of very large databases to recover association rules and patterns; a significant amount of academic and industrial research is focussed on developing more efficient and accurate data mining techniques. The earliest collaborative filtering systems required explicit ratings by the users, but existing systems are implemented without the user's knowledge by observing user actions. Ratings are inferred from, for example, the amount of time a user spends reading a document or whether a user purchases a particular product. For example, an automatic personalization method is disclosed in B. Mobasher et al., “Automatic Personalization Through Web Usage Mining,” Technical Report TR99-010, Department of Computer Science, Depaul University, 1999. Log files of documents requested by users are analyzed to determine usage patterns, and online recommendations of pages to view are supplied to users based on the derived patterns and other pages viewed during the current session.
Recently, a significant number of web sites have begun implementing collaborative filtering techniques, primarily for increasing the number and size of customer purchases. For example, Amazon.com™ has a “Customers Who Bought” feature, which recommends books frequently purchased by customers who also purchased a selected book, or authors whose work is frequently purchased by customers who purchased works of a selected author. This feature uses a simple “shopping basket analysis”; items are considered to be related only if they appear together in a virtual shopping basket. Net Perceptions, an offshoot of the GroupLens project at the University of Minnesota, is a company that provides collaborative filtering to a growing number of web sites based on data mining of server logs and customer transactions, according to predefined customer and product clusters.
Numerous patents disclose improved collaborative filtering systems. A method for item recommendation based on automated collaborative filtering is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,041,311, issued to Chislenko et al. Similarity factors are maintained for users and for items, allowing predictions based on opinions of other users. In an extension of standard collaborative filtering, item similarity factors allow predictions to be made for a particular item that has not yet been rated, but that is similar to an item that has been rated. A method for determining the best advertisements to show to users is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,918,014, issued to Robinson. A user is shown a particular advertisement based on the response of a community of similar users to the particular advertisement. New ads are displayed randomly, and the community interest is recorded if enough users click on the ads. A collaborative filtering system using a belief network is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,704,317, issued to Heckerman et al., and allows automatic clustering and use of non-numeric attribute values of items. A multi-level mindpool system for collaborative filtering is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,029,161, issued to Lang et al. Hierarchies of users are generated containing clusters of users with similar properties.
Collaborative filtering methods also suffer from a number of drawbacks, chief of which is their inability to rate content of an item or incorporate user context. They are based only on user opinions; thus an item that has never been rated cannot be recommended or evaluated. Similarly, obscure items, which are rated by only a few users, are unlikely to be recommended. Furthermore, they require storage of a profile for every item, which is unfeasible when the items are web pages. New items cannot be automatically added into the database. Changing patterns and association rules are not incorporated in real time, since the data mining is performed offline. In addition, user clusters are also static and cannot easily be updated dynamically.
Combinations of information filtering and collaborative filtering techniques have the potential to supply the advantages provided by both methods. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,867,799, issued to Lang et al., discloses an information filtering method that incorporates both content-based filtering and collaborative filtering. However, as with content-based methods, the method requires every document to be filtered as it arrives from the network, and also requires storage of a profile of each document. Both of these requirements are unfeasible for realistically large numbers of documents. An extension of this method, described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,983,214, also to Lang et al., observes the actions of users on content profiles representing information entities. Incorporating collaborative information requires that other users have evaluated the exact content profile for which a rating is needed.
In summary, none of the existing prior art methods maintain an adaptive content-based model of a user that changes based on user behavior, allow for real-time updating of the model, operate during the collection stage of information retrieval, can make recommendations for items or documents that have never been evaluated, or model a user based on different modes of interaction.